Our conference panel is pleased to invite proposals for papers dealing with the following broad thematic areas:

A. Recording aesthetics

The short yet intensive history of record production has revealed an indisputable relationship between recording technology and the finished sound recording. Magnetic tape became a harbinger of a technological revolution in the 1950s, while digital technology made its mark on the sound of the 1980s and, in more recent years, digital audio workstation (DAW), which has had a profound effect on the musical output.

Electronic Dance Music (EDM) festivals have flourished worldwide over the last 25 years. From massive raves sprouting around the London orbital at the turn of the 1990s to events operated under the control of corporate empires, EDM festivals have developed into cross-genre, multi-city, transnational mega-events. From free party teknivals proliferating across Europe since the mid-1990s to colossal attractions like Belgium’s Tomorrowland, and from neotribal gatherings like Southern California’s Lightning in a Bottle and other “transformational” festivals, to such digital arts and new media showcases as Montreal’s MUTEK and Berlin’s Club Transmediale, EDM festivals are platforms for a variety of arts, lifestyles, industries and policies. Unlicensed paroxysms, sanctioned extravaganzas, aesthetic frontiers, activist mobilisations, colonies of cosmopolitanism, they occasion manifold cultural practices, performed by multitudes to a cornucopia of ends.

Will Straw (Professor, Department of Art History and Communications Studies, McGill University; Director, McGill Institute for the Study of Canada)

Noel Lobley (Ethnomusicologist and Research Associate, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford)

Conference outline

Music, while summoning notions of intangibility, transience and loss, is also associated with material objects that serve to ground the musical, make the transient permanent and defer loss. Unearthing music’s association with materiality reveals a fascinating array of artefacts, including instruments, scores, transcribing devices, sound recordings and much more. Such artefacts provide vital reference points for historical research as well as inviting new creative uses, rediscoveries and (re)mediations. They also add to the ever-growing archives of past objects, whether stored in ‘physical’ or digital forms. Music’s material traces serve as vital ways of mediating memory, whether in private collections or public exhibitions. Furthermore, the use of musical ‘ephemera’ such as record sleeves, programmes, flyers and posters as a primary means for putting the popular musical past on display in museums and galleries has highlighted the ways in which such objects are not so ephemeral after all.

A special issue of [email protected] edited by Barbara Lebrun (IASPM-bfE, University of Manchester) and Catherine Strong (IASPM-ANZ, Monash University, Melbourne).

[email protected] is planning a special issue for publication in 2015, focusing on popular musicians hailing from countries with dictatorial or military regimes, whose deaths coincided with moments of dramatic political change and became instrumental in efforts of national reconstruction towards democracy. The visiting editorial team, Barbara Lebrun (University of Manchester, UK and Francophone branches) and Catherine Strong (Monash University, Australia, ANZ branch) are concerned with the historical and cultural processes by which the songs and media images of these artists have become, posthumously, sites of tension for the expression of a new national, sometimes diasporic, identity.

2014 marks the fifteenth anniversary of the release of the peer-to-peer application Napster. Developed by a student, Shawn Fanning, with the help of his friend Shawn Parker and uncle John Fanning, Napster established music downloading as a mass phenomenon. By 2001, 50 million users had downloaded content with Napster. Many other applications followed – Gnutella, Kazaa, LimeWire, eMule, Soulseek, BitTorrent, among others –further developing and entrenching p2p technology.